On the Run: Best Nonfiction of 2014

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City chronicles the effects the War on Drugs levied on one inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood and its largely African American population. Based on Goffman’s six-year-long ethnographic experience as a participant-observer in the community, the book considers how a cycle of presumed criminality engendered by pervasive policing obscures the friendships and associations of a group of residents, small-time drug dealers, everyday persons, and the lives they lead into nodes in a network of surveillance under operation 24 hours a day—and the very human costs involved. The book was recently named to Publishers Weekly’s list, Best Nonfiction of 2014, after garnering praise from both the New Yorkerand the New York Times Book Review.